I have read all previous references to ebook readers with envy, especially as holiday season approaches. I have had some anxious airport moments as I wait for my luggage with its many books to be weighed!

In the UK it has been difficult to buy the popular ereaders such as Kindle and Ebookwise. However, it has just been announced that Sony are going to launch the PRS505 here in a month's time, and at a much lower price than its rival the Cybook. Does anybody have a PRS505 (or 500)? How good is the selection of romance titles, given that it isn't compatible with Mobipocket? Do you use conversion software? How easy is that?

I have read all previous references to ebook readers with envy, especially as holiday season approaches. I have had some anxious airport moments as I wait for my luggage with its many books to be weighed!

In the UK it has been difficult to buy the popular ereaders such as Kindle and Ebookwise. However, it has just been announced that Sony are going to launch the PRS505 here in a month's time, and at a much lower price than its rival the Cybook. Does anybody have a PRS505 (or 500)? How good is the selection of romance titles, given that it isn't compatible with Mobipocket? Do you use conversion software? How easy is that?

Any tips would be gratefully received.

Thanks

Rachel

Rachel -

The Kindle backlog issue was dealt with a couple of months ago in the U.S., and with 140,000 titles available, it's a dream. For the last two months, they've had every new romance but one that I wanted to buy on it, and so I did. I was in L.A. last week and it was such a pleasure to just have the Kindle instead of three books, which is how many I read.

Do you know when Amazon plans to roll out the Kindle in the U.K.? Because Amazon is so large, my guess is that its leverage with publishers will mean a bigger and bigger group of books that will be Kindled each month. When I looked at the Sony, there was nowhere near the breadth and depth of titles available.

That said, though, I just read that U.S. publishers are considering a "strike" against Amazon over revenue sharing from Kindle downloads. I THINK that may have to do with the fact that right now, Amazon is taking a loss on many titles in order to grow an audience. The article said that U.K. publishers may participate in a strike if it occurs. That article was dated almost two months ago, and I believe that's when I first wrote about it the problem here.

The Sunday Times in early June said they planned to do so later this year. If you can verify that and are willing to wait, that's what I'd do. But do a little test...take your tbb list and add to it the books you've bought recently, then see how much of the list is available on the Sony. And/or the Cybook._________________Laurie Gold
http://laurie-gold.blogspot.com

I purchased a Kindle last week and love it. It is very easy on the eyes with no backlighting and that was its most important feature for me.

Laurie, I have purchased a number of Kindle books but notice some of the newer releases are not available. One example is Joanna Bourne's new book, My Lord and Spymaster which came out around July 1. But they do offer a Kindle copy of her earlier 2008 book, The Spymaster's Lady. Do you understand the rhyme and reason? Are some new books available only after a month or so or are they immediately available (if they are going to be) on Kindle?

Do you understand the rhyme and reason? Are some new books available only after a month or so or are they immediately available (if they are going to be) on Kindle?

I don't think there is a rhyme or reason to which books become available in ebook formats and which don't. Often, you'll see the latest book in a series available in ebook format, but the previous five or seven (or fifteen) books aren't available yet.

With newer books, I often don't know what they're thinking. E-book sales aren't counted on the best-seller lists (only paper), so maybe they don't want to release the electronic version until the book has hit the lists. Also, the publisher may have changed the way they release the e-book editions.

For older books, it might depend on what rights the publishers had. Earlier contracts often didn't give ebook rights to the publisher (as ebooks were a glimmer in the industry's eye), so the publisher can't sell those books as ebooks. Also, if the publisher has lots of backlist titles, they might want to hold off on releasing those until they have caught up with releasing new titles as ebooks. I think some publishers have released older titles as ebooks, only to see very low sales because the e-book market hadn't taken off yet. Releasing older titles might not pay off unless the author is very popular. (A few years ago, before the Sony reader and Kindle, someone at a big publishing company admitted that the sales of the ebook editions of their titles hadn't even paid off the expenses of creating the books -- IIRC mostly because of the cost of the copy protection and security features in the software.)_________________Join AARlist2 at http://www.likesbooks.com/listserv.html

I purchased a Kindle last week and love it. It is very easy on the eyes with no backlighting and that was its most important feature for me.

Laurie, I have purchased a number of Kindle books but notice some of the newer releases are not available. One example is Joanna Bourne's new book, My Lord and Spymaster which came out around July 1. But they do offer a Kindle copy of her earlier 2008 book, The Spymaster's Lady. Do you understand the rhyme and reason? Are some new books available only after a month or so or are they immediately available (if they are going to be) on Kindle?

Lea -

There was a hardcover book I was interested in about a month ago. They didn't have a Kindle version at the time, but two weeks later, they did. There may just be a lag, but I can't say why not all new books are available. You may want to check back for the title's availability in another week or so._________________Laurie Gold
http://laurie-gold.blogspot.com

I have been pretty lucky in finding most of the titles I want to read in a Kindle format, but not all of them. And I would agree that there doesn't seem to be any consistency in the release of books which is frustrating. Backlists can be a problem, too, which is disappointing. I contacted the Kindle Team about this and they suggested that I contact the author and/or the publisher of the book(s) I was looking for. I actually did that with one author and got a response from her indicating that she would talk with her publisher.

I have noticed that some books are available immediately and others at a later date so my "MO" now is to wait to see what happens with a title I am looking for. Recently there was a book I really wanted to read so I bought a hard copy only to see a Kindle edition a couple of weeks later.

I agree with others who have said that the more popular ebooks become, the more titles will be released. I hope so. I love reading on my Kindle so much that reading a regular book seems awkward._________________So many books; so little time!
www.shelfari.com/tinabelle

You can check what is available for the Sony Reader (PSR 505) by searching in their store site:
http://ebookstore.sony.com/index.html
AFAIK, all Harlequin titles are available at the beginning of each month, most Avon titles show up pretty promptly, and other publishers are more unpredictable.
I just heard in the last week that the Reader now supports a new international standard ebook format called EPUB. I haven’t even started to look around yet to see who offers what in that format.
I got the Reader very soon after it came out and have mostly been very satisfied, though my Reader was disabled by a bad firmware update yesterday.
I have almost 1,000 ebooks in my collection so far (400+ of them are romances), with about 750 of them loaded in the memory card in my Reader.

Just a note about ebook reader capacity. After fixing the firmware problem with my Reader yesterday I checked storage space to answer a question from my b-i-l. The 720 books loaded when I checked only use about 1/10 of the 8GB memory card I got when I got the 505 model Reader, so it should hold about 7,000 ebooks (though not usably without an upgrade to the table of contents design).